A Maine fisherman has an adventure involving a leaky boat and a journey into the belly of a whale and out again in a most creative fashion. An all-time family favorite for read-alouds. Superb story, characterization, and dialogue. Lots of fun and surprises. ( )

Starts off somewhat normal-like, gets out of hand in a right hurry. Another favorite Maine-ish book. ( )

Fantastic. Especially the giggling gull. ( )

A little long for the Make Way for Ducklings fans, but terrific for young schoolchildren.

The language is full of rhythm, repetition, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and other clever tricks to make it lively and funny. The art is fantastic, (in the classic tradition" as Burt's narrator would say) with full-color details of Burt and his boat & gull, and iconographic whales in a variety of colors. The design is also special, in that some pages are cliff-hangers, and the text gets interrupted, without even a comma, at the page break.

I love the details, like the sources of the different colors on Burt's boat, and impatient sister Leela, and the particular kinds of paints and debris used to tickle the whale's stomach, and the particular kind of band-aid.

Oh I wish I'd known about this when my boys were little. If you've not read it yet, and you like picture-books or tall tales, make haste to find a copy in your library system and check it out to preserve it from getting culled for lack of circulation." ( )

This is a sea story written in a classical way. It is the story of a man and his seagull friend who go fishing. He catches the tail of a whale on his fish hook. He carefully removes the hook and gives the whale a bandaid. When a storm begins to come his way, he tells the whale to swallow him. The whale swallows him but he is worried the whale will not spit him out. He throws paint and oil and all sorts of things to give the whale a tummy ache so it will spit him out. When he is spit out of the whale he realizes he is surrounded by whales. Then he thinks really hard and realizes they all want bandaids! GENRE: fantasy. USES: helping one another, look at the use of vocabulary. MEDIA: acrylics? CRITIQUE: I think is is a funny story full of creativity. However, the whole story is written in almost an old fashioned, Irish style. It uses lots of different vocabulary and could be challenging for younger grades.